Most journalists are terrible writers. Their copy is either overhauled by diligent editors, which produces something formulaic and generic, or not, and then it is often a sludge of convolutions and clichés, a graveyard of prose. This is the product that is so intensely, with almost religious fervor, defended by, well, journalists themselves.

It is not a place that, as a journalist, you particularly want to go: defending other people in the business who been loose with their facts. The lawyerly demeanor of the business is now so threatening that any deviation, or sympathy with deviators, makes you a near criminal.

Daisey is Jayson Blair – the New York Times reporter who famously concocted most of the stories he ever wrote – implies the media reporter Howie Kurtz, in a significant escalation of the contretemps. Kurtz, while a diligent and reasonably fair-minded reporter, is – and I doubt even he would argue – a leaden writer of dead-on-arrival prose, with limited skills for expressing nuance and subtlety or gradation.

At the point in time when Capote wrote In Cold Blood, the hierarchy of writing was exceedingly clear. Good writing was of higher cultural and intellectual value than mere journalism, of mere facts. How to see and how to think occupied a step up on the scale of human development than how to report. Journalists with any talent either grew up to write fiction, or, in one of the literary revolutions of the 1960s, applied literary techniques to facts.

The beauty and breakthrough of Capote's In Cold Blood is not, as Shafer suggests, that it used real facts, but that it brought a new level of writing to the rendering of real facts. The long tradition of crime reporting, a desultory and largely corrupt form (rewritten police reports), was suddenly remade by talent.

Still, Capote walked a narrow line with his reinvention of the form. Fiction and non-fiction appeared to be so either/or, while what he had written was not quite one or the other. And yet it must be called this or that. Norman Mailer was a much more cunning literary politician and subverter of genres in his book Armies of the Night. It was, in his characterization: "History as a novel/The novel as history."

Journalism from the mid-60s to the late 70s – and that includes virtually every practitioner we remember today – was a renaissance compared to the present age, a bureaucracy of fact and process and convention at the expense of language and expression.

Indeed, in the land of banalities that have poured out from journalists about Steve Jobs, Daisey can lay claim to have written something quite different and original. Worth noting is that much of the commentary about Jobs has come from technology journalists – not only some of the worst writers in the journalism game, but almost all of them famously conflicted by their various industry allegiances.

It is Daisey's telling of the Foxconn story that helped turn the practices there into an international business issue and that, happily, has started to produce reform. No one is arguing that Foxconn got a raw deal. Daisey gets into trouble because the makers of This American Life, were too dense or self-righteous – too literal – to quite understand the difference between what they do and what Daisey does. Daisey himself, for the sake of his own story, or even for the sake of reform, or because he was too remote from the catechismal differences between one kind of truth and another, did not make the distinction himself. (Daisey is further hung because he lacked the spin skills that journalists expect people to have when they need to publicly defend themselves).

Nearly all of the deacons of journalism are now weighing in on this one – a notable round-up of literary and intellectual mediocrity.

But most of those makers of popular media get away with it, with only sporadic and ineffectual questions asked, and, for better or worse, they're creating a new form of blurred lines that seem to speak to the evolving polymorphous information consumer, while journalism, in its strict and parochial sense, is losing its audience.

The problem may not be about facts or truth, but the form itself. Or the problem is value, or perceived lack of value. Howie Kurtz tries to be factually diligent, but I can't think of anybody who believes their understanding is deepened by anything that Howie reports on.

Journalism today speaks to no one as passionately as it speaks to other journalists. Fewer and fewer people believe it, feel informed or entertained by it, or find themselves compelled to seek it out. The journalism priests would say that one reason for our ever-shrinking following is because sinners in the profession have undermined our credibility.

I would say it is because journalism – calling it so is a recent and self-serving bit of professional elevation – is not our real job; writing is. And it is not Mike Daisey's factual lapses that we should be so focused on, but, rather, how he writes so well.